Clinging to Our ‘Roots’

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CreditArt Media/Print Collector/Getty Images

By Christy Wampole

May 30, 2016

Not long ago I came across a commercial for the genealogical research website Ancestry.com, in which a man recounts how he’d always believed his roots to be German. He had proudly celebrated this heritage — for example, by wearing Lederhosen and joining a German dance group — until a DNA test revealed the hidden reality of his origins: 52 percent of his ancestors were from Scotland and Ireland, he learned; there were no Germans in his family tree. “So I traded in my Lederhosen for a kilt,” the man says. And just like that, he replaces one set of roots with another, swinging like Tarzan from one vine to the next.

The commercial is silly in its reduction of identity to a wardrobe choice, but it does reveal something about the sense of self we derive from our roots, which are both troubled and enriched by the new global technological reality of our time. We can know more about distant ancestors than ever before. But what purpose does this knowledge serve? Why is the root such a compelling metaphor for thinking about our connection to ancestors, homelands, and the earth itself?

Humans are context-seeking creatures, and this need to feel woven into the world takes many forms: research into family history; pride about one’s hometown, state, or country and the specificities of these places that have marked one’s character, behavior, and speech; nostalgia for a past when people appeared to have stable destinies, when gender roles, social hierarchies, and the “order of things” seemed clearer, and when inherited categories went uncontested; and the pastoral longing to restore a lost communion with the earth itself. Rootedness is the most flexible metaphor for talking about the contextualized human being. Often, it compels us to such an extent that we forget it is a metaphor.

The History Channel’s current remake of the mini-series “Roots,” based on Alex Haley’s 1976 novel and its first televised iteration in 1977, has to some extent returned the idea to the contemporary American consciousness. Here, the cultural heritage transmitted from generation to generation in the context of the American slave trade gives voice to the legacy of those torn from their homes and sent toward an irrevocable and tragic future. This is a distinctly American narrative, but the language of rootedness can be found in a remarkable range of contexts, across cultures and in all kinds of writing — including poetry, nature writing and ecocritical philosophy — to describe the human’s self-extraction from the earth. How could the same image be used in such varied settings?

The philosophical novelist and essayist Michel Tournier, who died in January, believed that nearly all human conflicts could be traced to the tensions between rootless and rooted peoples. He offers many examples in an essay called “Nomad and Sedentary” in his book “The Mirror of Ideas”: the fratricide in Genesis involving the sedentary farmer Cain’s murder of his nomadic brother Abel, a shepherd; the invention of barbed wire in America in the 1800s, which marked the sedentarization of pioneers and bloodshed over the rightful ownership of land; the conflicts between the nomadic Tuareg and the settled Saharan peoples; and the Nazis’ demonization of the Jews, imagined as rootless and thus unrighteous transients.

It is often pointed out that tracing our lineage far back enough would show that we all came from the same place. But this primordial root is usually disregarded. For some reason, each collective, whether it be a nation, ethnic group or tribe, adopts a distinct conception of its own roots that tends to ignore this most fundamental idea of human connectedness.

We’ve arrived at a strange juncture in history, one that puts two world systems at odds: the first, an older root system that privileged “vertical” hierarchy, tradition, and national sovereignty; and the second, the “horizontal” globalized latticework of cybernetic information transfer and economic connectivity.

Perhaps this is what the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari anticipated in the introduction to their 1980 book “A Thousand Plateaus” when they described the rhizome, a figure for systems that begin in medias res with no discernible beginning or end and that operate on a principle of horizontal, unpredictable proliferation. The fact that our current moment, with its proliferation of technological networks, is more rhizomatic, doesn’t mean that rootedness no longer appeals to people. On the contrary, perhaps now more than ever, people have legitimate reasons for feeling alienated from the world and from one another — the greater the level of alienation, the more precious roots become.

Today, people across the world face an array of uprooting and alienating forces: the Syrian refugee crisis, Islamist terrorism, immigration, the identity-dissolving tendency of the European Union, global competition, capitalist uniformization and immersive, digital loneliness. Not coincidentally, each of these has been answered in its own way with an appeal to rootedness or, rather, re-enrootment. One hears in Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen’s speeches the same longing for a rerooting of their national cultures. A celebration of roots is a central motivation for those who wish to keep Confederate symbols and emblems of a specific white heritage in the public space. Paradoxically, this longing can also be heard in calls for the recuperation of minority histories, of suppressed voices and of the dignity of history’s victims.

While patriotic nationalism is usually imagined as the polar opposite of diversity-focused multiculturalism, the proponents of each actually have very similar motivations and desires. Each group hopes to preserve or recuperate a sense of rootedness in something. Given the great confusion about how to celebrate one’s own roots without insulting someone else’s, this struggle will certainly continue in the coming decades.

The nation, of course, is still a meaningful unit. For centuries, people have died, and continue to die, for their nations. No one, on the other hand, will ever be willing to die for “global,” as a friend of mine wisely put it. In fact, globalism seems to challenge the very possibility of rootedness, at least the kind that once relied on nation-states for its symbolic power. How will people be rooted in the future if global networks replace nations? Through bloodlines? Ideologies? Shared cultural practices? Elective affinities? Will we become comfortable rooting ourselves in rootlessness?

These questions go hand in hand with uncertainties about the health of the planet. Our relationship with the earth is fraught with anxiety, if the sustained interest in the Anthropocene and other manifestations of humanity’s self-excision from the natural world is any indication.

Efforts to repair a broken circuit with the planet include the push for outdoor preschools, which seek to restore the umbilical connection between children and Mother Earth by delivering them back to their natural habitat. It is telling that Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education, often made analogies between children and plants in his writings. In his view, plants model the cosmic embeddedness necessary for human happiness and thus offer children a living example of resistance to the uprooting forces that constitute modernity.

Throughout history, many philosophers — including, for example, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Heidegger — have believed that the land and climate of a particular region impart certain characteristics to its inhabitants, whose temperaments, language, and cultural production are heavily influenced by the topographical, meteorological, and botanical features of the place. This bioregionalism resembles the French concept of terroir, a term used in agriculture and gastronomy to describe the relationship between flavor and place. But does the same hold true for humans?

A desire for roots and rootedness may be acquiring a new importance in the new global tangle, where certainties are hard to come by. But I wonder sometimes if this root-oriented thinking actually causes many of the problems whose solutions we can’t seem to find. Think of your own roots and how much of your identity relies on them. How many things that trouble or anger you relate in some way, if only peripherally, to this rootedness? If you were to suddenly discover that you were mistaken about your roots, would you trade in your Lederhosen for a kilt? How negotiable is your sense of self? How much do your roots determine your actions? What if you’d been born with someone else’s roots, say, those of your enemy?

Each person will have different answers to these questions. And yet there is something universal about rootedness as well. All people seek a context into which they may enfold themselves. If we truly are wired for connectedness, we’ve gotten our wish in a sense; our unprecedented system of networks has shrunk the globe and at least offered the possibility for new kinds of continuity and growth. But it remains to be seen how this connectivity will be reconciled with individual identities, with old brands of embeddedness, and with nostalgia for the first garden.